Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Obama Throws Tantrum over Gun Control Defeat

President Barack Obama lashed out defiantly and viciously at political opponents who defeated his efforts to expand federal gun regulations today. Standing with families of victims of the Newtown school shooting at the White House, the president claimed that opponents of expanded federal background checks had "no coherent arguments" for their position, and that the "gun lobby" had "willfully lied" in the course of the debate. Ironically, while accusing others of lying, President Obama resorted
to false claims and statistics about current laws, including the
repeatedly debunked argument that 40% of gun sales are private, and that guns can be bought over the Internet without background checks.
It was partly the dishonesty of those very arguments that had led
potential supporters of new bipartisan legislation to doubt the
administration's motives in supporting the bill. The administration's defeat came earlier Wednesday, when the Senate
failed to pass a cloture motion to end debate on a bipartisan proposal
introduced by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA). Only 54 votes of the necessary 60 votes could be found to support an expanded federal background check system (among other changes),
partly because of fears that extending such checks would require the
creation of a federal gun registry that could lead to confiscation. The failure brought an end to four months of fervent campaigning by
the president during which he used the Newtown disaster--or, in the eyes
of many critics, exploited it--to make an argument about the urgent
need for new laws, even if such laws would not have prevented the
Newtown atrocity itself. Many Democrats rallied behind him, hoping at
first to pass a new assault weapons ban, then abandoning that effort for
more modest regulations...more